There’s a saying long before CrossFit was invented that fools and money are soon separated. This fact spans a wide spectrum of lives, especially in the health and fitness industry. You need look no further than this past. years The liver king fiasco proof. Both beginners and experienced lifters often look for a shortcut or a hack to improve their gains.
Marketers, supplement companies and fitness influencers are here to fill that void to make your wallet a little lighter and the promise of gains within reach. Here’s another cliche I can’t help but type: “If something seems too good to be true, it usually is.” Remember that when the next insincere influencer comes along.
Either way, the fitness soapbox moment is over. Here, seven trainers tackle fitness trends that have emerged in 2022 and must be buried in a gym graveyard far, far away. You were warned…
The Death of the Workout Tag
Kevin Mullins Jr. CSCSBS in Kinesiology, University of Maryland, Director of Product Development – The St. James
2022 has been an interesting year in fitness history. On the one hand, we have seen the return of most gym goers to public facilities as fears of the pandemic faded and a desire to work out in more energetic and better equipped environments returned. It was really great to see so many people again.
Yet, for anyone who remembered the rules and decency of training in public, many others were completely unaware of the others. Leaving weights on the bars, dumbbells on the floors, and dominating multiple pieces of equipment are the common infractions that almost every dedicated weight room warrior accepts as “normal” in the same sense that we all know traffic in the hours of rush is odious but unavoidable.
The biggest offense has been the massive rise in the use of tripods for social media content. Of course, we are in a new era of fitness. We tell the world that your training is more important than training. Of course, the younger generation is more tech-savvy and wants to capture the magic of the greatest sensations in the gym.
But, thinking filming your content is more important than me doing my regular workout? Yeah, it won’t fly. Move your tripod and your phone from my bench; I was using this. I don’t think I will change my deadlift platform because I’m in the background of your shot. Oh, and don’t even think I’m going to tolerate you standing in front of the barbell rack flexing in the (pleasantly bright) lighting while your friend films the B-roll for your “wicked-arc.”
I love that people want to celebrate themselves by being in the gym. I’d rather see Instagram reels of you lifting and working your cock than another silly dance or swallowing a tidal pod, but let’s be generous and understand that the gym is for everyone to share.
Shiny new toy syndrome
Andrew Heming, MS, CSCS, NSCA-CPT, former college head coach, teacher and coach
Stop with the “Look at me!” I came up with a crazy new exercise, never seen before! Although this is a quick way for fitness influencers to get attention on social media, but an even quicker way to stop your progress. Most, if not all, of these “new” exercises are drastically inferior to the basic exercises you already know. Instead of letting your social media feed dictate your training decisions, follow this plan for 2023:
- Choose the appropriate variations of the basic movements (squat, hinge, push, pull, carry) that work for you. Don’t worry if your best variation on one exercise differs from others.
- Train hard.
- Stay consistent.
- Insist on proper sleep, rest and nutrition.
- Keep a training diary. Look for ways to keep progressing with your best exercises.
- Let your progress in your training diary and your body, not the “innovative” workouts of influencers, get you excited about working out.
- Use innovation only when needed to solve a specific problem (e.g. lack of equipment, joint pain, poor mind-muscle connection)
Stop shivering for “recovery” purposes
Allan Bacon, Ph.D.., an online personal trainer specializing in training weightlifters and body composition clients
Relax (pun intended) with cryotherapy and ice baths. Unscrupulous health quacks have pushed ice baths harder than ever in 2022 for every benefit under the sun, from enhanced recovery to longevity to “insert an outrageous claim here.” Unfortunately for these charlatans, these claims showed a misunderstanding of the applicability to real humans and a blatant disregard for the negative aspects associated with these practices.
You can’t just take research on nematodes, mice, or molecules and assume that means a practical health outcome for a human. This is often not the case due to the magnitude of the effect or a compensatory mechanism in the human body. But that was conveniently omitted from the discussions on this podcast and these oft-touted social media segments.
The reality is that the benefits of whole body cryotherapy and cold water immersion are likely to be non-existent or at best modest and prone to placebo (Wilson 2018; Hohenauer 2015, 2019).
Additionally, cryotherapy and cold water immersion are potentially harmful in the long term. It appears to alter muscle and vascular adaptations to training, reduce muscle protein synthesis, and studies show it can even lead to muscle loss in some cases (Yamane 2015; Roberts 2015; Figueiredo 2016; Fyfe 2019, Fuchs 2019 ). In other words, say goodbye to those gains! A few short-term studies suggest positive benefits beyond placebo due to hormesis.
Now, I don’t want to completely cut the wind from your sails, my chilly friends! A potential positive application of cryotherapy would be training in a multi-event competition scenario (think CrossFit or strongman), over a short period of time (~3 days), for what is likely a perceived reduction in delayed onset muscle soreness and potential decline. of inflammation.
What is the moral of the story? Better to leave the ice cubes in your drinks than as part of your standard workout.
Death of body parts
Raphael Konforti, Senior Director of Fitness at YouFit gyms
Monday is chest day, Tuesday is back and the week continues… The classic body split. You can train body parts more than once a week. Do you need seven days of rest before working your muscles?
From professional athletes to novices to celebrities, following a full body or upper and lower body workout is proven to be much more effective. The more often you train a muscle, the more you can stimulate it to grow and respond. The body repeatedly adapted to perform major movements like presses, pull-ups, carries, squats, lunges, and deadlifts daily, weekly, and monthly. Think about the progress you could make if you trained an exercise twice a week instead of once.
For a total body split, I recommend combining the upper body pull (back and biceps) with the lower body push (quad dominant) for one day and the upper body press (chest, shoulders and triceps) and the lower body pull-up (hamstring and glute dominance for Add a rest day in between for 2-4 sessions per week. Stick to it for 4-6 weeks before switching splits for the next 4 to 6 weeks.
The burial of fad diets
Detric Smithtrainer and owner of Results Performance Training
I’m ready to retire from fad diets forever! Fad diets have an insidious habit of gaining popularity. It’s time to ditch fads and popularize developing strong eating habits instead.
Fad diets are usually restrictive and encourage deprivation, leading to burnout and yo-yo dieting. Some go so far as to cut out critical food groups (I’m looking at you, keto)! Healthy eating shouldn’t be all or nothing and one size fits all.
It’s impossible to ensure you’re eating the right balance of nutrients by blindly dieting without a working understanding of nutrition. A balanced approach based on education is the only way to ensure that your eating habits will work for you in the long run.
So, I’d like to replace fad diets with an emphasis on factual knowledge, moderation, and realistic daily changes. These are the basics for creating long-term eating habits that will last a lifetime.
Stop basing your decisions on wearable technology
Chris Cooper, strength and nutrition coach at fitness nerd
One trend that has crept into the fitness industry that could use a simplified approach is the reliance, or in this case, overreliance on wearable technology and the data that comes with it.
We can track our sleep, readiness, calories burned, metabolic rates, and steps, among other things. For many, it can become an unhealthy obsession where you have to achieve a specific goal or reach a certain number.
What ultimately happens is pacing around the house, aiming to hit our step count for the day, tracking our calories burned during a workout, and using that data to determine if it was good or not, or base our nutritional choices on how much we burned. While tracking can have its benefits, it can come to a point where we have all this data and are trying to figure out what to do with it.
Macro Mayhem and nutritional extremes
Mike T. Nelson, Ph.D..a metabolic fitness professional, strength trainer and educator specializing in tailoring nutrition to each individual’s needs.
Stop me if you heard these:
Carbohydrates are bad because they make your body secrete insulin and make you fat.
Oh wait, carbs are good because they’re the fuel your body uses to lift heavy things.
Fat is bad because it is calorie dense.
Oh wait, fat is good because there is no insulin release.
Protein is good since you need it to build more muscle,
Oh wait, protein is because… autophagy.
Every popular diet book makes one macronutrient the enemy. The truth is that all macros are useful and none are purely evil.
Your metabolism is dynamic, and for better body composition and to achieve PRs in the gym, you want to use both fat and carbs for fuel, i.e. metabolic flexibility. Embrace the complexity required and ditch the simple story of macro-extremism in 2023.
